Luke Jerram, Aeolus - Canada Square Park, Canary Wharf

Aeolus is an acoustic and optical pavilion designed to resonate and sing in the wind with no eletrical power or amplification - a giant Aeolian harp. Through vibrations in harp strings attached to some of the tubes the artwork really does sing in the wind. The tubes also hum at a series of low frequencies.

Apparently Aeolus was inspired by a trip Jerram made to Iran where a well-digger spoke of the wells singing in the wind.

http://www.lukejerram.com/aeolus

Mondrian/Nicholson: In Parallel - The Courtauld Gallery

An exhibition which explores the friendship and creative relationship between Mondrian and Ben Nicholson and their influence upon each other. The exhibition features work from the early 1930’s through 1938 when Mondrian moved to England to escape the growing Nazi threat on the continent and into the 1940’s. Mondrian moved to Hampstead at Nicholson’s suggestion and they had studio’s next to each other. In 1940 Nicholson moved to St Ives with Barbara Hepworth to escape the Blitz but Mondrian felt he needed an urban environment and moved to New York where he died in 1944.

The period includes Mondrian’s best known works the exhibition would be well worth visiting for his worrks on their own but Nicholson, at a time when abstract art was looked down upon in the UK, also contributes exceptional work which does not look out of place alongside the Dutchman. There are differences of course, Mondrian’s famous black lines ensure a flat work without depth, the colours reducing on his canvas’ throughout the period as he looks for balance in the works. Nicholson on the other hand often creates drama by using dull colours around a bright centre.

Alighiero Boetti - Tate Modern

Boetti was an Italian artist who spent 1970’s in Afganistan until forced to leave when the Soviet Union invaded in 1979, he opened an hotel in Kabul as an art project. His outstanding works, which take up 2 rooms of this exhibition alone, are a series of embroideries, some very large, of maps of the world with the countries represented by their flag. He did these from the middle of the Cold War till the early 1990’s tracking the changing geopolitical situation. He used helpers with the stitching, women in Afganistan and then Pakistan. One map features a bright pink sea which came about because the stitchers, living in a land-locked country, did not recognise the ocean on the map. Therefore they used the colour which was in plentiful supply, which happened to be pink. Apparently Boetti loved the random nature of this solution and it certainly makes for a striking image.

Sherry and Tapas Tasting

West London Wine School
28 February 2012

As we have rather a liking for sherry (!) and with increasing interest in what used to be a deeply unfashionable drink, we trotted off to a sherry and tapas tasting at the West London Wine School.  The trip was a Christmas present (alongside a bottle or two of sherry!) and we weren't disappointed.  Rather oddly the venue was a Big Yellow Storage unit in west London but all was explained when we arrived (with slightly raised eyebrows - in over 20 years in London, we hadn't even heard of the train stop - Imperial Wharf):  we were ushered into a specialist wine storage unit with a long table delightfully laid with seven (yes, seven!) glasses each and platefuls of rather fine-looking nibbles.    We were welcomed by proprietor Jimmy Smith and not long afterward the evening started in earnest, with a very pleasing Moscatel (Lustau Moscatel de Chiopina) from Jerez, very refreshing indeed alongside fresh fruit salad.  Smith gave an interesting and entertaining talk with slides as we worked our way through six other tastings, each accompanying food chosen to complement and be complemented by the sherry.  It was fascinating to realise that the sherry production process enables such a wide range of sherries to be produced, from utterly gloopy, syrupy sweet wines made from Pedro Ximenez grapes and containing 370g of sugar per litre (yes, 370!  It went beautifully poured over vanilla ice cream!), to bone dry Manzanilla and Fino styles, which went down well with savoury treats such as olives and walnuts.  It was also very interesting to discover that the blending process means that every bottle of sherry is a blend of every year's sherry produced in that solera, right back to the very first year - which in some cases is about 200 years!  Yes, the proportion of the oldest years in each bottle is vanishingly small but it's certainly more than homeopathic (!) and the idea of age and continuity is very appealing.

My favourites were a 12 year old Amontillado (Lustau) inhaled with manchego cheese, honey, bread and hazelnut oil, and a 30 year old Palo Cortado (Gonzales Byass, Jerez) which slipped down very nicely with gingerbread.  They were both wonderfully smooth and rich, with a little sweetness but certainly not too much (although interestingly, their tawny golden colour made them "look sweet" if you get my drift).  The 30 year old Oloroso Dulce that accompanied a slab of stilton and fruit cake was very fine too. 

Spitoons were provided but neither we nor any of the other guests used them, nor were we encouraged to.  Seven largish glasses of sherry later we rolled home rather merrily.  A very fine evening strongly recommended.

SB

Cabaret, dir Bob Fosse

Having read The Berlin Diaries by Christopher Isherwood (reviewed on this site last year) I felt the need to watch Cabaret which somehow I've never seen before. Very entertaining of course, about bohemian Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic but also very interesting in the way the rise of the Nazis is protrayed. This is an understated background to the film throughout but also the (unfortunately true) impression that they enjoyed wide popularity with 'ordinary' Germans is not ignored or denied, not always the case. This support is powerfully brought home when the one song to be sung outside the cabaret club (in a beer garden), Tomorrow Belongs to Me, is revealed to be being sung by a Hitler Youth member and one by one everyone in the garden gets up to join in singing and saluting. The only person not to join in is an older man, perhaps having fought in the First World War he knows what's coming.

Banff Mountain Film Festival UK Tour

Union Chapel
London
24 February 2012

The UK tour of the Banff Mountain Film Festival is a selection of short films taken from the main Banff Film Festival which runs in Canada in November each year, bringing together a range of outdoor and mountain culture films. 

The films selected for the UK tour covered a range of sports, including free skiing in Canada, kayaking (with truly dire results) in crocodile infested waters in central Africa, bouldering (aged 9) in the US, mountaineering in Pakistan (complete with frozen beards and a bit of sobbing), cycling (into thin air off tall platforms, sort of like a cartoon), and perhaps most extraordinary, highlining (naked).  As you can imagine none of these are activities that I would ever under any circumstances contemplate, and I sat there in a sort of horrified fascination as a diverse group of extremely enthusiastic but possibly unhinged people did dangerous and frequently pointless things with great passion and commitment, dying in the process in one case.    The films brought to life another world, a world of which I really have no experience, and as such, they were interesting and intriguing.  But made as they were (on the whole, anyway) by the sporting protagonists themselves, they had the feel of a long reel of holiday films - "this is me, in my backyard, performing an impossible feat, and here's me performing another impossible feat, and oh yes, this is me, doing something spectacularly impossible".  You get the gist.

I'm glad I went as it did make me see how the other half (or rather, the other 1%) lives.  But I'm fairly sure that in any other walk of life, people with that sort of attitude might in fact be sectioned.  It's  a strange world...!

SB

The Dials at What's Cookin'

Birkbeck Tavern, 45 Langthorne Road, London, E11 4HL
http://www.whatscookin.co.uk/wchome.html

I had read that The Dials' sound is psychedelic country rock, influenced by The Byrds and Barrett era Pink Floyd. It all sounded very promising and they certainly lived up to expectations, at times on the more keyboardy numbers they also have that fairground sound of early Madness and Inspiral Carpets. If this all sounds a bit retro it is I guess, but they made a fantastic sound, a very enjoyable evening.

http://www.thedials.co.uk/home/